Opera Joins anti-phishing league in new V8 Beta

On the day that a survey stated that 32% of all phishing sites and scams were located in America last month, it was revealed that Opera are working hard to protect its users in the same manner as Mozilla by introd (while Microsoft simply doesn't support the International Domain Name standard, but will also be pre-patching against it. It's expected to be fixed as standard when IE v7 is finished).

In the latest version the browser displays security information inside the address bar, located next to the padlock icon that indicates the level of security present on a site.

The small, yellow security bar appears on secure sites and displays the name of the organisation that owns the relevant certificate. In addition, the second Beta of Opera 8 only allows localised domain names from top-level domains, in order to attempt to clamp down on spoofing using similar-looking Unicode characters in an attempt to pass off one website as another.

"By clicking on the bar the user has access to more information about the validity of the certificate. These anti-spoof measures help users make educated decisions about a site's validity and security," Opera said.

Whatever fixes are produced for your choice of browser, it's still down to the user as ever to use commonsense and not click anything that looks too good to be true, in addition to cleaning your browser's cache so there's as little as possible in the way of passwords to steal.